Travel checklist: How do I create a template that doesn't repeat regularly?
 

I find myself creating the same list of things I need to do before I travel over and over again. Is there a way to set it up once and pull it up every time I'm getting ready for a trip? It's not something I do every week/month, etc.

Make a copy of the checklist and put it on hold. When you need it, select it, duplicate it with Edit->Duplicate and set it to be active.

For a more advanced version, check out Curt Clifton's Populate Template Placeholders script which will let you specify arguments to fill in the blanks. [url]http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~clifton/software.html[/url]

Cool, thanks!

As a regular user of the templates, I can't stress it enough that the placeholder system would be great to integrate this directly into OF. Having the lists on hold in a folder on hold is ok, but not really clean. It gets in the way in some perspectives.

Btw. below I list a just recently released book on the topic of checklists. I can really recommend it:

Atul Gawande, "The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right". Metropolitan Books, 2009.

What I do (idea stolen shamelessly from Curt) is keep the templates in a folder which is dropped. I have a separate perspective which only shows the contents of that folder in a new, minimally sized window for when I want to use one.

Doesn't a dropped folder get archived? Will a dropped folder with an active project in it also get archived?

I don't use the automatic archiving function, preferring to archive by hand. However, a quick experiment on the default database suggests that a dropped folder with otherwise active projects in it doesn't get archived. It may even be that dropped folders don't get archived at all; I didn't test the more general case. If I'm wrong and it gets archived, you can simply open the archive and drag the folder back to your main database. I don't know how often you archive, but you could also just mark the folder as active before archiving.

I've kept my Templates folder dropped for years now and the automatic archive feature has never moved it, so I think the answer to the question is a definite no.

Having said that, however, I would like to learn more about the rules used to decide if something is eligible for automatic archiving. I have a couple folders marked as dropped with all of their enclosed items also marked as dropped, and they don't seen to be getting auto-archived either.

I haven't carefully examined the behavior, though, so it could be I've modified something in there recently which prevented an auto-archiving of the entire folder structure. And if I know they're ready for archival, I often just move them manually.

If anyone knows more about how OF decides if something should be auto-archived, I'm all ears.

-Dennis